At the end of each month, I take stock of the previous month. What went well? What did I learn? What brought me a simple joy? These monthly reports are a way to encourage myself to take delight in the littlest of things. I find that Ten Things I Loved allows me to always see the silver lining, even when there are hard moments in a month. And taking joy in the simple things is paramount to how I want to live, making 10 things an invaluable tool for me. Here’s this month’s simple pleasures.

Professional

The Renfrew Centers National Conference. The Renfrew Centers offer treatment for eating disorders, anxiety, and trauma around the country. Each year, they put on a national conference on eating disorders, and I had the wonderful fortune of being asked to speak this year alongside two really amazing professionals in the ED community. We spoke on multicultural issues with regard to eating disorders and just had a really powerful two hours together as we really tackled these issues in honest, powerful ways. Too often, we fail to get really honest about race, culture, class because we’re scared that in our candor, we might offend but honesty is how we can all grow. I was so grateful for this opportunity.

Partnership Meetings for Circle de Luz. The Circle de Luz experience is so important to our members and to sustain and even grow it, we have to be deliberate about seeking partnerships that make sense and can help the program (and, thus, the girls) thrive. We had some really great partnership meetings this month that are making me super excited about the future.

Circle de Luz Holiday Giving Party. We have two major fundraisers each year and one of them is our Holiday Giving Party where entrepreneurs, artists, and more donate items to be sold at a discount for those who are doing holiday shopping and all the proceeds go to our programming. We almost doubled our profits from last year and the party is still going on virtually. Go pick up a few items for your loved ones!

Personal things

Celebrating an engagement. We have an engagement in the family and so we started the month with an engagement dinner that brought the two families together. It was a wonderful time with lovely people and delicious food. Now, we’re looking forward to a spring wedding!

Seeing old friends. A few dear friends that I’ve known a long time ago and who moved in spite of the fact that I threw myself at their ankles and held on for dear life while they were packing up came through town so I had the decadent pleasure of catching up with some of my favorite people. Deep conversations and silly hilarity ensued. Perfect combination.

Birthdays. Several people I love had birthdays this month (so did I). It was fun to celebrate birthdays all around.

Thanksgiving & The Turkey Bowl. We had a really lovely Thanksgiving with family. Good food, a movie outing, lots of football watching. Also, dear friends host a Turkey Bowl every year, but we aren’t usually able to go because of holiday travel. This year, we could and, boy, was it fun! The Turkey Bowl is a parent vs. child football game and though we were outnumbered by the teenagers plus my spunky six year old, Team Advil (as we renamed ourselves after the kids called us Team Adults) pulled through with both a football victory and ultimate Frisbee victory. Related: we definitely lived up to our rename the next day.

New Eyes. I got new glasses from Warby Parker (super affordable, a home try-on option and donated glasses for every purchase).

Decorating for the holidays. We loaded up and headed to the mountains the day after Thanksgiving and cut down our Christmas tree. A gorgeous too big tree now occupies our living room but, boy, does it smell good. The Glee Christmas CD was our decorating soundtrack, and Happy and I only broke a few of our favorite ornaments. Next up, Happy tells me, is stringing popcorn for the tree. Wonder if we can leave enough popcorn out of our bellies to actually get the string to wrap around the tree.

A new phone. Totally indulgent but my phone was really old and sometimes just froze and failed to work so I finally got a new one. And while the new phone now consistently works, what is even better is that I now have a working camera. Our regular camera is broken and the camera on my old phone was awful so it is nice to be able to use my phone camera again.